Quote of The Day

cfaesi: just on the harvard site

  not astro people

  one business grad student and one education grad student

 me: hm

  can't trust those businessmen

 cfaesi: especially if they're Arabic!

  (just channeled my inner Eric)

 me: of course! arabic businessmen are by nature the most devious people

 cfaesi: and they should be profiled at every opportunity

 me: I'm glad we see this the same way

 cfaesi: yeah, this country is way too liberal

  cant believe we dont have a flat tax and that they allow immigration

 me: I know. This country is going to hell. First, gay marriage, now we raise the debt ceiling!?

 cfaesi: yeah that was such a pro gay move

 me: obviously. I think what this country needs is another president like G.W.Bush

 cfaesi: nah, too liberal

 me: this just made my day

cfaesi: really

  I'm starting to be physically disgusted with myself
-Conversation between myself and Chris

Picture This...

As is usually (always) the case, here comes a long, much-overdue update on things. I'm too lazy to type, so here are lots of photos for you! :)

Ok, in the most chronological order I can think of...

Infrared Cards! Our astronomy club intramural soccer team. (Not to be overshadowed by the Infrared Sox softball team...)

Chris and I played in the All-Campus Band concert! Sarah and her family came to see it :)

Went to an SPS (Society of Physics Students) zone meeting in Morehead, KY. They have 21m radio telescope!

Fiesta Friday Dinner! Me, Jenny, Chris, Alec and Brian (Elaine is taking the photo)

Graduation party for Chris, Eric and Jenny. Look at all our delicious food and YES, that's right- a CHAMPAGNE TOWER. We're that classy, folks.

My cocktail dress. But aren't we just so charming? :)

The gang. Top: Eric, Tess his girlfriend, Chris and me. Bottom: Elaine, Jenny and Charity.

The late-night party crew. Jenny, Me, Chris, Jeff, Con (astro prof) and Elaine. This photo is priceless.

The graduates. :)

Hats off!

Words later, sometime! :) 

Astronomers Do It At Night

Over winter break I went to Seattle for the AAS conference. It lasted from the Sunday immediately before classes to that Thursday. Because of this, I skipped the first week of school. At first it sounded alright- in fact I was a bit excited (come on, don't tell me you're not excited when a class got canceled?) Once I emailed all my professors and got homework for the week though, I wasn't really too keen on the idea of missing the first five days of class...

I presented a poster over my research from last summer at NAU. It was great- lots of interesting and stimulating people came around and asked me about my research. I met a lot of really cool people- astronomers and students alike.

Alec, Jenny and I in front of my poster!

Last year Chris went to AAS in DC and whenever I called he always told me how tired he was and how busy he was the whole time. At the time, I had a hard time believing that you could be busy all day at an astronomy conference... Yeahhhh, how wrong I was. Talks started at 9 in the morning and lasted until about 5. There were a few invited talks each day that almost everyone attended (big conference rooms, well-known astronomers speaking), and in between those were special session talks over specific areas of astronomy that were smaller. And going on all day in the exhibit hall was the poster session where people like me stood next to their poster all day waiting for people to come by and look. The conference in general was socially tiring, but worth it.

After the "conference day" was over, I would be invited to dinner with someone from somewhere, or I went to scheduled dinners. After dinner was drinks, after drinks was talking, after talking was finally getting back to the hotel to pass out in bed. Lather, rinse, repeat!

I did get to go out while there as well. We went to Pike Place Market...

One evening we went to the Space Needle. It was really neat to see the city at night!

Nicole (from my REU!), me, Teresa and Jenny at the top of the space needle.

We went to Chinatown for lunch one day and got dim sum (only two vegetarian options... sad...) We also went to the original Starbucks! Not that exciting really, but I had to go out of principle. One evening I visited University of Washington and got to talk to their grad students and faculty about grad school (eek!) and see the department. I also went for a run down on the waterfront...

And got lost on the way back. After the conference ended, Jenny and I stayed until the following Sunday, bring our trip length to a whole week. We had planned this out months ago, and in hindsight I probably should have come back to school as soon as possible to get back in the groove of classes and catch up on what I missed, buuuuut... how many chances do you have to go to Seattle (paid for, no less)?

Things we did:
-Visit the EMP (Experience Music Project) and Science Fiction Museum (a music and science nerd's dream come true)
-Eat at Top Pot Donuts
-Went to the market again
-Visited the Fremont Troll (a huge stone troll under the Fremont bridge!)
-Went to the Erotic Bakery... haha. It was very interesting.

That was about it. Two nights Jenny and I stayed with a friend of Alec's, and the last night we stayed with Keaton (he did an REU at Indiana and stayed through early September). Then on Sunday we left early to catch a bus to SeaTac airport and from there it was back home. After a layover in Minneapolis, I made it back to Indy about midnight and then drove back to Bloomington.

All in all, Seattle was great! I could do without the weather and the extremely poorly-designed road systems... but the stores, restaurants and nightlife were diverse and unique. Skipping the first week of school? Not one of my best ideas, but I had a great time anyway. Hopefully next year I'll get to go to AAS again!

Mamma Mia!

Again, most of you probably don't notice, but I changed the background of my blog. Poppies + blue sky = simple happiness.

Okay, so this is only, what, 3 months late, but here are some photos from our Murder Mystery Dinner. It was entitled "Pasta, Passion and Pistols". It was a loosely scripted dinner mystery and was TONS of fun. Even though we were given information about our characters, we all still took them in our own directions. It would be boring for you and tedious for me to tell you the details of the story and the various highlights of the night, but suffice to say there were plenty of awful Italian (more like French) accents all around. A night to remember! A few photos for you...

The gang! Teresa, Eric, Alec, Steven, Chris, myself, Elaine and Jenny

Dessert- "spaghetti sauce and meatballs" cake from Jenny!

Struggling to stay in character as my questionable boyfriend Bo (Eric) fights with my mom (Jenny) and brother (Alec)

Good times.

Happy Winter Holiday of Your Choice!

In a very festive blogpost, here's some Christmas topics for you. Also, I just realized blogpost is an anagram of blogspot... interesting.

A couple of weeks ago we had a Christmas Friday Dinner, complete with Ugly Sweaters (although not many partook, and Alec came in a suit just to be the best-dressed...) And we had a champagne tower that (sort of) successfully worked. Yes, we're that good.

From top, L to R: Steven, Elaine looking classy, Jenny, Eric's caramel onion, Chris with a very unhappy Nyx, and my dazzling smile.

Maybe you're wondering what that caramel-covered onion is all about? Well, you should be. A while ago, Jenny suggested we make caramel apples, but make one a caramel onion and give it to Eric. The idea was of course very well received. After putting it off until well after proper caramel apple eating season, she did the deed. To ensure that Eric took a whopping bite out of the onion, we made it a caramel apple eating contest (we affectionately, and jokingly, call Eric 'Fat Eric' even though he is very much not fat... he just eats an ungodly amount of food). As we started the contest and everyone took bites of their respective apples and onion, we realized the caramel had not quite cooked correctly and was incredibly brittle. Instead of getting the hoped for large first bite, Eric got a few very disgusting small bites. At which point expletives left his mouth and the rest of us erupted into laughter.

We are such good friends :)

I'll leave you with a photo of my once-beautiful tree that was massacred by my cat. Notice that there are NO more ornaments on it...

Some Christmas cards I hastily made, but they still turned out okay.

 HAPPY CHRISTMAS! :)

Jack Johnson & Physics

I am sitting listening to Jack Johnson and reading my book 'The Flying Circus of Physics'. It's a really interesting little book about the physics behind day-to-day phenomenon (such as mirages, tides, and why wintergreen lifesavers spark when bitten). I had a long and very stimulating conversation tonight with a good friend about physics, astronomy, the point behind both, why astronomy is a worthwhile science, life in general and green flashes, amongst other (non)related things. Astronomy is an endlessly fascinating subject (to me, of course).

Last weekend I took a practice physics GRE, which is a notoriously challenging and frustrating exam. I scored absolutely dreadfully, but to be honest, I'm not that upset. I had never seen quite a lot of the material, simply because I haven't taken the classes yet, or reached the material in current classes. And the majority of the material was based on previous classes I haven't thought about in... well, too long I guess. All in all, I'm not happy with my score, but I'm not unhappy either. Also, it was just a practice exam! The physics GRE is unlike any other exam a physics student has ever taken or will ever take again. This seems Just Plain Dumb to me, but just yesterday one of the astro profs explained her reasoning why the GRE is actually indicative of grad student success. It made a lot of sense at the time, especially for physics grad studnets, but much less for astronomy, and unfortunately there is no astronomy GRE... But yes, I scored pretty low- a 500 out of 999, which isn't toooo bad for this test, but the GRE is very odd in the sense that it is (essentially) scored on a comparison scale of how others did on that particular exam. On this certain one I took (from '91...), others scored fairly high, so I was only in the 13th percentile, which means I scored higher than only 13% of the test-takers for this particular test... Yeahhhhh. Not the best %, but my raw score wasn't horrendous. I've had to have this process of scoring explained to me a few times before I fully grasped it, so don't really worry about the details... Long story short- the physics GRE sucks.

This weekend is going to be crazy, but I will have a lot to say at the end. Until then, enjoy some photos from my recent(ish) life. 

Jenny and I at the Rent show!

Moka bein' cute

One of the most legit meals I've ever made: Pan-fried tofu and veggies with thai noodles (after I ate some of it...)

Galaxyrise

One of my friends once said 'The more you know, the more you don't', and at the time I thought it was a very pessimistic outlook on life. The more I think about it though, the more I appreciate what it means. I feel like every day I'm learning all sorts of neat and exciting new things. And every time I learn something new, it opens up new doors with new questions I can ask, now that I'm equipped with more knowledge. It's not a bad feeling to know that you don't know everything (that sentence was a bit redundant...). Gaining knowledge gives you the tools to learn more and more and more!

Yesterday, we watched Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' (go ahead and laugh, we all know it's the cheesiest thing since Swiss). While I was watching Carl talk about if he could go anywhere backwards in time, he would go the library of Alexandria, I started thinking what would happen if I went back in time. I was suddenly struck with a terrible thought that if I was the sole representative of some civilization, I could never communicate all the knowledge we've accumulated. I was thinking I would tell the Greeks or whoever how their astronomy was so terrible and such, and I kind of had a pseudo-conversation in my head where I tried to tell them how they could measure quantities of stars and I couldn't even remember how to find the mass of a star... I think I learned this (and it was drilled into my head...) less then 6 months ago, but I can't for the life of me remember.

Wow, that entire paragraph was the most pointless anecdote I've come up with yet. But after I thought of that, I tried to think how I would tell them how to make electricity and build machines, but I don't know how to do either of those, really!!! That was when I decided that if the human race ever sent anyone back in time, or to another planet, they should never, never, ever pick me to represent our collective knowledge.

This has been a semi-intellectual post... I'm quite proud of myself! I think I shall now frolic and learn about quantum mechanics, thank you very much!